Contact
by Suicidal Mickey Mouse
Summary: One officer is feeling a little down, and another officer just wants to help. Oneshot. Slash.


_Disclaimer: I do not own 21 Jump Street or the characters associated with it. I am not profiting from this story. This story is a work of fiction and is not based on any real people or event. Any similarities are merely coincidental._

**Contact**

He's sitting on the couch when the door of the cabin opens. It does this with a large crash, causing him to jump from his place. His book topples to the floor, effectively losing his place. He turns around quickly to see a familiar form in the doorframe with his hand flying out to stop the door from rebounding back to hit him. A quick assessment provides that the man is soaked from the rain that is coming down from the sky in torrents; his hair is plastered to his head and water droplets are cascading down his leather jacket.He crosses his arms over his chest and sends the man a look that can only be described as displeased, not angry like he is going for.

"What do you think you're doing?" His tone manages to compensate somewhat for the look, but not to the point where the intruder might actually be threatened.

"You weren't answering my knocks." The man answers quickly and shrugs, flashing his very best innocent look. "I was worried."

"Only because you talked with someone at the chapel." He replies quickly, shaking his head as he walks to the door, shoving his newfound company forward and closing the door with another bang.

The man stumbles a few steps from the shove, not really from the force but at his surprise from the action. "And our concern is going to make you bitchy all night?"

"No." Now he is able to achieve a half-angry look. It's still not what he is going for, but it will have to do. "The fact that you nearly broke the door is. That and the whole thing where you were spying on me." He starts back into the cabin, but stops next to window and looks outside. An eyebrow rises at the object that is sitting on the porch. "You rode your bike out here in this weather? What exactly did Hoffs tell you?"

"Jude didn't tell me nothing. Fuller did. Said he was concerned."

"So where's the rest of the cavalry?" He turns back, hoping that he is successfully hiding his surprise that his Captain jeopardized his secrecy.

The man shrugs. "I didn't invite them."

"Why not? They probably would have jumped at the chance to rescue me." His head shakes bitterly and he turns away again. "You want to be the only hero for once or something?"

"Have you been drinking?" His eyes fall on the beer bottle on the side table that holds a lamp next to the couch. It's full, but he knows well that that might mean nothing.

He scoffs. "Yeah. I'm about to open up my second keg. Sure glad I have someone to share it with. They say you shouldn't drink alone you know."

"Geez, Hanson. The captain is really worried about you." The sarcasm hits a nerve with him for some reason. It sounds like something that he would say, which doesn't seem right coming out of the mouth of the man in front of him. "You could at least--,"

"The captain thinks that I'm going to some dark place where all I'll do is sit in a corner and slit my wrists." Tom Hanson snaps and cuts off the man, turning back around quickly. "As you can see, I'm not. You can go back and ease his fears."

"Yeah. Like I'm gonna leave when you're like this."

"I'm fine." Hanson states firmly.

He rolls his eyes, knowing how far from the truth this is. "You're acting like a chick. You're not fine."

"Doug…" Tom sighs with a slight pleading tone in his voice. He knows that if Penhall stays the likelihood of him being able to maintain any sort of front will lower with every sentence. Penhall could read him.

Penhall jumps quickly to the assumption that his friend is protesting. "Tom, you're sitting alone in some cabin that no one else even knows you own, with an amount of sarcasm that I wish you'd use on a McQuaid case. You're not fine." He repeats the statement as though this will affirm it to his partner and get him to admit something.

Tom turns away and walks back to the couch, sitting so he is no longer facing Penhall in the hopes that this might help him take a hint. "I just want to be alone for a while."

Doug raises his hand to his forehead, rubbing at a stray drop of rain and tension at the same time. He has had the entire day followed by an hour and a half of driving to worry about the potential problems that had arisen in his absence. It was enough to make him go crazy. His hand falls back to his side and he chooses to ignore the lack of invitation that Tom has given him, and enters sitting on a chair across from the couch. It is after he sits that he speaks again. "Why?"

"What?" It's a simple question that doesn't really need clarification, but it appears that in the time it took for Tom to sit on the couch and Doug to make his way over, Tom has drifted back into his own world.

"Why do you want to be alone?"

"Seriously?"

"No. I rode all the way out here in the rain to listen to you bullshit me. Yeah, seriously."

"Fuller tell you why he was concerned?"

"He mentioned something about trouble on your last case." Penhall gives his answer, and then Tom gives no reply. He waits a minute, and they sit in an awkward silence where Tom still says nothing. "You know I'm not the best at this whole meaningful discussion thing, and I'm not about to sit here and try to pull the information out of--,"

"I stabbed a man in the groin."

"You what?!" Doug does a double take, despite already facing the man, shaking his head. The statement came out of Hanson's mouth rather calmly, and Tom had definitely chosen one of the most tactful ways of saying it, but it still shocks him and causes him to stiffen in discomfort.

"I stabbed a man in the groin." Tom repeats, his tone quieter than it has been, but still relatively steady.

"You mean to tell me that you took a knife—you stabbed a---you mean to tell me that you chopped off someone's—aw shit!" He runs both hands through his hair while looking down at his shoes and then looks up again a slight smile on his face as though he's realized a joke has been played. "Man why would you say something like that?" Doug shakes his head. "For a moment there I actually thought you were serious."

"I am." Tom's eyes drift down.

"Seriously?" Doug's eyes nearly bulge out of his skull.

Tom turns away, an annoyed look on his face. It is geared mostly towards himself, for letting himself even say anything. "That being the definition of serious and all."

"I didn't mean it like that, I just…" Doug trails off. "You just put it out there pretty fast." He waits a minute, hoping that maybe Tom might jump in with clarification of some sort, but nothing comes. Curiosity quickly outweighs patience. "So you really chopped it off?"

"Not off…at least not all the way from what I was told. Just mangled pretty bad."

"Why?"

"The case went pretty badly." Tom sighs. There was no stopping where he had left things. He really had to tell the whole story. "It was over at Manning High. Someone was putting a lot of kids in the hospital with some bad drugs…and none of them were the type to use drugs. So Fuller sent me in. I was just some average kid who had just moved there…It wasn't that hard of a case. It was pretty easy to make the guidance councilor for it. Stressed out kids went to him, he slipped them something to make everything a bit easier for them. I went to him with some crap about being worried about my grades and the transition to a new school…I think I threw in something about my parents fighting to make it seem worse, I don't know…He told me to come back in a week and see if I still felt that way."

"Of course. He'd only want to give you drugs if you were really serious." Penhall remarks with a sarcasm that came with the time he spent with criminals.

Tom doesn't acknowledge the comment; he's now in the story. "When I look at it now, it's so damn obvious that something was off about him. He was staring at me—and not just the whole, 'I'm really listening to what you're saying deal'—he was staring." He blinks for a couple seconds, to clear his train of thought. "I finished the day at school and then went back to Jump Street. I parked a couple of blocks away like I always do, you know, in case anyone from the case might be following me?"

Doug nods in recognition of the habit Tom had that was smart, if not annoying when he was stuck riding with him.

"The thing is I didn't even notice someone was following me. Not until he jumped me."

Things suddenly seemed much quieter in the cabin. Tom's voice for one and to Doug it seemed that all the background noise was suddenly put on mute. "Who?"

"The guidance councilor. He…tackled me…shoved me against the wall…pulled a knife. He caught me really off guard, and it's not like I brought my gun for a case like that. I tried to stay in character…just keep him calm until I could make a move."

"Like you were taught." Doug remarks. Any other day it would be fun to make fun of his partner's respect for protocol, but today it seemed far too serious.

Hanson nods. "Yeah." He swallows before continuing. "But -- I didn't think he was going to—he threw me off guard when he--," He continuously cuts himself off. Nothing that he is saying is coming out right. He swallows again and suddenly looks at Doug, eye to eye. "He kissed me. And I---I tried to throw him off, but he was strong…stronger than you man. He just laughed. And then he forced me onto my knees…" Hanson hesitates and looks away again. "He went for his pants."

"He what?!" Doug is unable to stop himself from exclaiming with outrage. It's not in his nature to be quiet when something like this comes up in conversation, not when he's with one of his best friends.

"He was going to rape me." Tom continues somewhat stoically, as though he hasn't heard Penhall's outburst. "It wasn't like he had made me for a cop or my cover was blown and he just wanted to make sure I didn't turn him in. He just thought I looked like I would be a good fuck…I just started doing everything I could to fight him—Somehow I got the knife…and I just swung. It hit him there…right after he unzipped." Hanson stands walks over to the window where he looks out to watch raindrops collide into moonlit puddles. "Some officer found us there like a minute later. We were a block away from the chapel. One goddamn block."

It takes Doug a minute to process everything. He couldn't believe that all of this could happen in the three days he had taken for a brief vacation. His partner, assaulted. He stands before speaking. "But you're OK, right man? I mean it's not like he actually managed to--,"

"To what? To make me suck him off?" Hanson turns back his eyes, filled with tears, flashing angrily. He is finally able to achieve the angry look that he wanted at the beginning of the evening, only now he knows it will never work to make Doug go away.

His tone softens, rivaling that of Tom's when he started telling his story. "No. To hurt you. I mean I know he started to…but he didn't right? I mean you're just here because you need to fulfill some sort of time off requirement for Fuller and you don't want to sit in your apartment doing nothing, right?"

"Yeah, I'm ready to burst out into show tunes with choreographed routines. I just came up here so I wouldn't disturb my neighbors." He shakes his head bitterly, an action becoming suddenly familiar to him.

"Shit, Tom, you can't let it get to you like this. You got the guy." Doug is surprised to hear the pleading in his own tone as he takes a step or two closer to his partner. He eases into the steps, almost afraid of scaring the man, now that he knows the whole story.

"And it only cost me my dignity."

"He would have gone after someone else. Someone who probably wouldn't have been able to fight him off. You stopped him from ruining some kid's life. There is absolutely nothing undignified about that." He runs a hand through his hair. "Shit I sound like Hoffs."

Under any other circumstance, Tom would have laughed. Now he just looks hardly at the man standing in front of him. "You really believe that? You think I'm some sort of hero?"

"I think you need to stop viewing it as some sort of tragedy and start looking at the good that came from it."

"Bullshit. You just don't want to deal with me going on about it."

For some reason, his comment hits Penhall hard. He knows that very little could be farther from the truth. He just doesn't know what could make Tom think differently. "If I didn't want to deal with it then I wouldn't have come up here." He takes a few steps further towards him; now he's only a foot or so from his friend. "Despite whatever it is you think about me, I do care about you."

"And that's supposed to make me feel better? My partner cares, I guess that makes all the things I've thought about in the past couple of days a waste of time doesn't it?" The words come out of Tom's mouth in a tone that has returned to a state of emotion that wasn't angry or sad, just upset. "I'm so glad that you cleared that up for me."

"It's not a waste of time, man, it's just…" Doug trails off and sighs. "What do you want to hear? What's going to make you feel better? What do you need to hear to make you come back and stop worrying everyone? Do you need to hear that it's alright? Or that nobody thinks anything less of you?" He takes a single step forward, accompanied by a deep breath, and looks down briefly before meeting Hanson's slightly surprised eyes. "Do you need to hear that if it meant that you would be fine I would have traded places with you in that alley in a second? That the fact that you're just sitting here alone in this cabin because of that bastard makes me want to go and castrate him a second time?" He asks these questions softly, unable to keep the emotion out of his voice. "What do you need to hear?"

Tom doesn't say anything, too taken aback by the speech to form words. He's known Doug long enough that he wouldn't expect that from the man.

"I'm not going anywhere Tom. Not until I'm sure you're coming back with me."

A long silence follows. Tom finally steps away from the window closing the gap between him and Doug. If they had been in a school the proximity would have suggested that they were whispering about the mystery aspect of their day, but since they were in Tom's cabin, there was no explanation. "You really mean that Doug?" He asks the question innocently, almost like a child doubting someone's promise.

"Yeah I mean it. I'm not just gonna leave when you're like this. I'm here until you tell me what you need."

Tom doesn't say anything, but steps forward, closing his lips over Penhall's. This kiss isn't a violent one like he experienced days before. It's a gentle kiss that allows both parties to close their eyes and just relax with the emotion emanating from it. It only lasts for a moment or two before they both break away breathing heavily.

"Tom, what are you doing?"

Tom gives his partner a strong look and informs him quickly. "This is what I need."


End file.
